Implementing Experiential Writing to Increase Engagement

At the start of the year, one of my primary goals as a humanities teacher is to get my students invested in their written work. This aim has become all the more pressing in a world where generative AI can churn out something that looks a whole lot like writing, which has led me to increasingly focus on one of the things that AI can’t do: have experiences.

For those unfamiliar with experiential education, David Kolb’s learning cycle serves as the primary model for instructional design, where students move through the following stages in their exploration: experience, reflection, abstraction, and experimentation. Writing is most often located in the reflection and abstraction stages, where students are invited to process an experience (how it felt) and then consider why said experience mattered.

All too often, however, the primary student experience is relatively passive, leaving students with little investment in the reflection and abstraction stages. How then might teachers design more expansive, engaging experiences for students that can serve as the spark for future writing activities?

Example 1: Interviews

Before students even enter our classrooms, they are already members of rich, complex social networks that they consider meaningful and important. If we want students to get excited about their learning, one great strategy is to design an experience that leverages these relationships.

I have found short interviews to be an effective mechanism for complicating any preconceived notions students may hold about a topic, as well as surfacing some of the hidden ways in which it might already be present in their lives. For example, students in my religious studies elective conduct an interview where they ask another person two basic questions:

1. How do you define religion?
2. Could you describe a significant past encounter with religion?

After the interview, students write an extended reflection where they answer the following questions:

• What surprised you? What didn’t?
• How are your interviewees’ responses similar to or different from your own thinking?
• How might you explain any similarities or differences?;

The ensuing discussions are often rich: Some students might begin to question aspects of their own understanding that they previously took for granted, whereas others might learn something new about their peers or even their own family.

When thinking about how to translate this into your own context, focus on identifying big themes or concepts that students will be exploring in your unit or course, as students likely already have ideas about what these things mean (as do the people around them). Additionally, focus on interview questions that elicit stories, which not only are more likely to get people talking, but also help students see how these concepts find expression in the lives of those around them.

Example 2: Wayfinding

Similar to interviews, wayfinding is another way for students to explore a key theme or concept in a relatively open-ended manner. The difference here is that, rather than discussing said concept with another person, students are tasked with locating that concept in their surrounding environment.

When teaching about borders in my humanities elective, I ask students to walk around the surrounding neighborhood and identify as many borders as they can find (physical, psychological, social, etc.), documenting their findings with photographs and brief sketches. After they finish their exploration, students then write a blog post about one of the borders they found most interesting.

The above interview reflection prompts can work here, though if you want to aim for something a bit more directed, I recommend drawing up on Project Zero’s framework for complexity. Students might consider complexity over time (how did this border come into being?), complexity of perspective (how does this border impact different groups of people?), or complexity of engagement (how do they relate to this border?). You can also scale this activity up or down depending on your school’s context: Students can explore the confines of a physical school or campus, a neighborhood, a town, or even a city.

Example 3: Activate (and Complicate) Existing Interests

Another great strategy for teaching writing experientially is to identify the activities or interests that occupy student attention outside the classroom and then design an experience that complicates said relationship. For example, we know that technology (and social media, specifically) plays a huge role in our students’ lives, so one of my favorite assignments invites students to give up their phones for 72 hours and then write about that experience.

Again, my go-to reflection questions follow a similar structure:

• How did that experience feel?
• What surprised you about that experience?
• What new questions emerged?

If you have already introduced specific texts, schema, or thinkers in the class, you can also ask students to engage with those ideas in their reflection. Again, a simple prompt that works well is “Which text from our course most connects with your experience, and why?”

The ensuing reflections are often profound, though one of my favorites was the student who realized that she didn’t actually know how to get to campus without her phone and had to physically print off directions from Google!

Example 4: Reframe Guest Visitors

If designing for experiences outside the classroom feels daunting or logistically prohibitive, teachers can always seek to create experiences within the classroom that serve as the foundation for future writing. This is one place where rethinking the structure and format of guest speakers oozes with potential. Rather than inviting someone in for a lecture, reframe the visit as a conversation (I often ask my guests to come up with a list of questions they have for my students in advance), which opens up more opportunity for unexpected exchanges.

In the aftermath, I ask students to “landmark” the discussion by identifying the most important moments of insight. What most resonated with you, and why? What most challenged your thinking? What new questions emerged from this exchange? These reflections can then serve as a schema through which students evaluate future texts or topics.

Assessment

Because the above experiential writing exercises are exploratory in nature, it can be challenging to find a mode of assessment that doesn’t also stifle student thinking. That said, I have found it helpful to focus on reflective moves that deepen engagement and insight: formulating (and answering) questions that emerge from their exploration, making connections to outside texts to analyze and reframe the student’s experience, or making inferences based on observations.

In other words, it’s less about students articulating a specific idea than about deploying relevant techniques that allow them to articulate more complex understandings. Indeed, I’ve found that students often appreciate this mode of thinking, as it allows them to remain the ultimate arbiter of what they aim to explore in their work.